An op-ed piece in Salon remembers and bemoans the death of the middle class:

In our neighbors’ driveways, in their living rooms, in their
backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally among
the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, waterbeds,
snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios. I’ve always
believed that the ’70s are remembered as the Decade That Taste Forgot
because they were a time when people without culture or education had
the money to not only indulge their passions, but flaunt them in front
of the entire nation. It was an era, to use the title of a 1975
sociological study of a Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats. That all began to change in the 1980s...

Once again this spring a wall of ice moved off some northern Minnesota lakes, damaging homes of those who built them too close to the shoreline. There are reasons why some local building codes incorporate setbacks from shoreline, and not just for riparian environmental preservation.

The Monarch in the top photo is the first one we have had this year raised from an egg laid on milkweed in our garden. She eclosed about 0730 this morning and will fly away before noon.The title quote is the last sentence of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - one of her classic novels, but one that should NOT be the first Christie you read. Get experience reading a dozen or two other ones first; save this one for later.

1 comment:

We hyphenated our names. It is stupidly hard for a man to change his name upon getting married in the US--even when his original name is included in the new one. We were given conflicting information about what to put on the marriage certificate by the person in charge of county records and by the DMV after the fact. And the only reason we were able to go through with it without paying a ridiculous amount for a name change like people who change it for purely personal reasons is because one supervisor at the DMV said to let us do it since our original names would both be there. And she might not have if he'd just wanted to change to mine.So if anyone is having difficulty getting their name changed, I recommend going to the offices you have to go to multiple times if they say no on your first visit. Only some of the employees will be willing to admit that the old laws and forms are outdated and should be treated more flexibly than tradition dictates. And ask for the supervisor. The people who sit at the desk are understandably unwilling to not follow the rules to a T.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, or distant relatives are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net